Sitting just a few feet from me in my home office is 2 terabytes of RAID 5 storage, in a cabinet barely bigger than a one-gallon milk bottle. Lying on my desk are four 8-gigabyte Compact Flash cards, each no bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Is it any wonder that few people seem to talk about tape for the SMB market anymore?

As the cost of disk-based storage continues to plummet while drive densities simultaneously increase, it is attractive for small businesses, already using RAID as primary storage, to back up servers to a second RAID system, often located near the primary, and sometimes --- a little smarter --- down the hall. Of course, we know that's simply not good enough. Every enterprise corporation backs up data either directly to an offsite storage service provider, to local tape-drive arrays whose tapes are then stored offsite (assuming they don't fall off the truck or get stolen), or maybe even both.

No doubt about it, for a small company, tape is a hassle. Cartridges are expensive. The drives have lots of moving parts that wear down --- after all, recording on tape is a technology that is nearly 70 years old (and originally developed at the behest of Bing Crosby who was unsatisfied with the quality produced by using wire recorders to pre-record his not-so-live radio shows). And since the rise in tape-cartridge capacity has not kept up with disk capacities, lots of tapes are needed. Knowing which tape is which, keeping track of each, rotating the inventory, and retrieving individual files all are time consuming.

The disk drive market has consolidated considerably over the past several years, with Seagate's May 2006 acquisition of Maxtor the latest example. Other names have come and gone, including Conner and PrarieTek. Even Hewlett-Packard and IBM don't manufacture drives anymore.

Consolidation has hit the tape-drive market even more. AIWA. Alloy. Archive. Cipher. Colorado Memory. Combyte. Everex. Irwin Magnetics. Maynard Electronics. Mountain Network Solutions. Tallgrass Technologies. Tecmar. They're just some of the once-recognizable names whose tape drives dominated the market and which appeared under their own brands and the names of dozens of system manufacturers. The list of tape formats (QIC, QIC-Wide, Travan, DAT, LTO, DDS, VXA, variations of these and more) is dizzying. Even Sony finally threw in the towel on DAT in late 2005.

It's time to add another name to the list.

On Aug. 30, Tandberg Data Corp., the American subsidiary of Norway's Tandberg Data ASA, announced that it is acquiring "substantially all of the assets" of tape-drive maker Exabyte Corp., based in Boulder, Colo. Expected to be completed by year's end, the Exabyte name will disappear, though, according to the press release, "all employees of Exabyte will be offered positions with Tandberg."

In a world where tape backup is of dwindling interest, perhaps a merger of this sort is necessary. I sure hope that the result will be the "stronger, profitable company with a robust product portfolio" that Exabyte president Tom Ward and Tandberg president Gudmundur Einarsson are promising.

Though tape represents only a tiny fraction of the average integrator's revenue stream, the value of this easily managed technology cannot be underestimated --- especially for very small businesses that lack the savvy or budget to implement another means of offsite data storage. And offsite is the key. The best onsite RAID will be of little value following a fire, flood, hurricane or other calamity.

Tape lives.

ITworld.com

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